Finding a Voice

Here’s another piece from The Story Grid archives about how writers find their voices…using Malcolm Gladwell and the gestation of his wonderful book, The Tipping Point, again as my point of focus.

So it’s 1996, about ten and a half years after the party in Washington D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood in the rented apartment where the young pishers Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg formed a lifelong bond.

That party is the event where Gladwell spoke with Jefferson Morley about Starrett City in Brooklyn, New York, the development that turned away minority applicants because of a theory published in Scientific American in 1957 and a mathematical model that predicted a 30 percent minority “tipping point” for white flight. The whole tipping thing has been marinating in the recesses of Gladwell’s brain since reading Morley’s Double Reverse Discrimination in TNR back in 1984. Its time is coming…

In 1996, Gladwell’s a newbie at The New Yorker. He’s written some solid stuff for the magazine in just his first few months. FYI, a one-year contract as a staff writer at The New Yorker requires delivery of about 50,000 words, or 12 pieces, one per month or so. But in practical terms, delivery of content is loosey-goosey.

On purpose.

Writers serve at the pleasure of their editors who of course serve at the pleasure of their publishers who, if they don’t own the house or magazine themselves, serve at the pleasure of their CEO or Board of Directors. All of which is to say that as long as your boss: 1) knows who you are; 2) has no internal cringe when your name is mentioned and 3) believes that you are pulling your scull for the company boat in sync and with vigor…whether you technically deliver the specific number of words per year is of little consequence.

Within reason of course.

George W.S. Trow was one New Yorker staff writer who’d played the fair-haired boy for editor William Shawn way past his wunderkind expiration date. He didn’t publish much after Within the Context of No Context, preferring to cling to his high end/big think reputation as he kept himself warm and comfortable inside the editorial boathouse. When Trow resigned in a public kerfuffle about how the barbarians had at last overrun the literary castle with Tina Brown’s appointment as editor, Ms. Brown’s wonderful reaction, reported by the American Journalism Review, outed Trow as more magazine mascot than indispensable contributor. Here’s Ms. Brown’s response:

I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.

But to say that staff writers at magazines don’t sweat their contractually stipulated word counts would be a gross prevarication. The only thing a long form journalist fears more than never getting to the big show (and The New Yorker is The New York Yankees of literary magazines)…is getting there and then screwing the pooch. Making it and then getting fired.

So my gut tells me that Malcolm Gladwell probably had a piece of paper tacked up on his virtual corkboard above the writing desk of his mind with the following notations that add up his word counts for his first three pieces:

3205 words—Blowup

2793 words—Loopholes for Living

5260 words—Black Like Them

It’s May 1996 and he’s 11,258 words into his 50,000 annual word nut. Many miles to go before he sleeps…

But his three pieces are very much of a kind. He’s figured out what fiction writers would call his “voice,” which is the mark of the pro.

The voice is a writer’s must-have security blanket. Once a writer “finds” his voice, work is no longer about overcoming a complete lack of confidence in one’s ability to hold a reader’s interest. That is, you’re not trying to imitate someone else in order to create narrative drive anymore.

You figure out that writing like Tom Wolfe or Gay Talese when you’re a Canadian from Nowheresville, Ontario (Gladwell’s hometown) will never work. You learn that truth because you tried mimicking Wolfe-ian prose so unsuccessfully for so long that you reach a point of such desperation that you quit trying to be someone else and actually begin writing as yourself. And that’s when someone other than your mother and your boss starts to pay keen attention to your work.

So you keep doing that, writing like yourself, and more people catch on…and here you are at The New Yorker.

Now what the work is about after you have stopped running away from your own peculiar way with words is finding enough interesting things to say about something. Not “interesting” for the reader per se. But “interesting” for yourself.

Every single pro writer I know is all about finding material that will obsess him or her.

If they find it, they’re fine. They’ll make deadline. They’ll be able to be nice to their wives and kids or boyfriends or cats or whatever.

But if they’re struggling to care about something…they’re in trouble. And so is everyone and everything around them. Watch out dinner table! And if you find yourself around such a writer, don’t even think of asking if “something’s wrong.”

Because “Nothing is wrong…when everything is wrong. Don’t you understand Goddamnit!”

This is one of the reasons why “assignment writing” sucks. Even though it can pay the rent and even more depending upon your connections. What may interest an editor intent on getting something “5,000 wordish on the plight of the Iguana in Papua New Guinea for the special fall edition on ecology” could very well bore the shit out of a writer. This is why around the same time as Gladwell was cutting his teeth at The New Yorker…when I was an editor at Doubleday and asked Steven Pressfield to write me up another epic historical war novel to follow up Gates of Fire…Pressfield politely (actually not so politely) told me to go fuck myself. I knew immediately thereafter that this was a guy I needed to work with no matter what. And he came around in the end and wrote a novel that I think is far more accomplished than his calling card.

But I digress.

Gladwell’s ten thousand hours as a beat reporter for TheWashington Post combined with his early days at American Spectator and Insight and as a moonlighter fleshing out long form think pieces for Washington Monthly and The New Republic by 1996 have taught him how to write as himself. And he now feels confident (as he should) that he can translate his own particular interests and passions into pieces that a certain Beltway/New York/East Coast intelligentsia readership will enjoy.

What is the quality of Gladwell’s “voice?” It’s easy to discern just from his first three New Yorker pieces.

Blowupis a story that debunks the notion that we can micromanage big systems to eventually reach risk-free perfection. The controlling idea of the piece is little things can have huge effects. Gladwell hammers home this message using the O-ring failure in the space shuttle Challenger explosion to explain that it was just one of a myriad of little things that could have gone wrong. The fact that all of the rockets don’t blow up is remarkable.

Loopholes for Livingis ostensibly a standard book review assignment. Gladwell covers two books inside similar legal terrain (Ill Gotten Gains: Evasion, Blackmail, Fraud, and Kindred Puzzles of the Law by Leo Katz, University of Chicago Press, May 1996; and Integrity by Stephen L. Carter, Basic Books, HarperCollins, February 1996). But I suspect Gladwell wasn’t handed these two books and asked to review them for The New Yorker’s book section because they were “hot” titles. According to Bookscan, Ill Gotten Gains has sold 311 total copies since 2002, while Integrity has sold 7,825 which means nothing about either book’s merit of course but it’s reasonable to assume that Tina Brown wasn’t being bombarded with phone calls from their publishers to review the titles either. These books are strictly “mid-list” nonfiction stuck in backs of catalogs.

But Gladwell found and read them on his own. And then he figured out a “way in” that he could use to examine something he personally found interesting—the squishy world of rationalizing our not so magnanimous behavior. He pitched the piece, got approval and then nailed another controlling idea that he’d been poking at for years—conventional thinking is prejudicial and lazy.

Gladwell has held that view since way back in High School. His Ad Hominem: a Journal of Slander and Critical Opinion was a political newsletter he started up and wrote as a teenager. According to an interview he did with J. Timothy Hunt for the Ryerson Review of Journalism in 1999, the ‘zine would focus on “a thing that appeals to a person’s feelings of prejudice rather than his intellect…The rule was that every article had to attack someone personally, says Gladwell. I wrote a column called ‘The Moral Pejorative.’”

Black Like Themwas a piece that extended Gladwell’s range, a courageous writing act that added an unconventional autobiographical element to his arsenal. Rarely do you find journalists today sharing anything remotely associated with their private lives…that is without making a HUGE DEAL about it. Nonfiction writers either give you it all in confessional memoir or nothing.

Rarely do they use their own life experiences as simply interstitial tissue to tell a larger story. They’re either THE STORY or they’re not there at all. By relating a “positive” experience coping with racism straight out of his extended family and an “amusing anecdote” of his own about the stupidity of the whole bugaboo, Gladwell was able to explore another idea stuck in his brain’s craw—that context doesn’t just influence human behavior, it can actually be the direct cause of it.

That is, we can’t help but act differently under disorienting circumstances or surroundings. What’s at the heart of Gladwell’s thinking about race (and what he’ll also put forth about crime in his next piece) is a quote from the antagonist Noah Cross in Robert Towne and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. (You know it always comes back to Chinatown for me)

…most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of ANYTHING.

Gladwell being Gladwell, though, instead of taking us into the heart of darkness of crime, he tells us an extraordinary story about how changing the context of a neighborhood for the better creates something of a miracle.

And the neighborhood he chooses to concentrate when telling that story?

It’s none other than the 5.6 square mile zone patrolled by New York’s Seven Five (75) precinct. This is the police department tasked with East New York, Canarsie and The Starrett City development…the very same neighborhoods Jefferson Morley wrote about in “Double Reverse Discrimination” in 1984.

Coincidence?

More on Starrett City and how I suspect it profoundly influenced Gladwell’s thinking about Tipping Points next.

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“we can’t help but act differently under disorienting circumstances or surroundings.”

I just watched My Fair Lady (over the holiday) and thinking of the story of transformation of a flower girl in Edwardian London being treated like a lady at the ball. For me the crux of the heart of the turning point is that she has had a profound tipping point experience a la Kurt Vonnegut prior to the Dong Dong Dong where Hodgins and Pickering congratulate themselves over a silly bet. This is what elevates the story from a mysogynistic experiment to a truly vital hum experience of transformation. And the tragedy is she now has nowhere to fit in the society.
For me, it all comes back to My Fair Lady.

Thank you for introducing me to the word “interstitial”. This opens up my thinking regarding the power of homeostasis in character and plot.

“we can’t help but act differently under disorienting circumstances or surroundings.”

I just watched My Fair Lady (over the holiday) and thinking of the story of transformation of a flower girl in Edwardian London being treated like a lady at the ball. For me the crux of the heart of the turning point is that she has had a profound tipping point experience —a la Kurt Vonnegut prior to the Dong Dong Dong— whereas Higgins and Pickering congratulate themselves over winning their silly bet. This is what elevates the story from a mysogynistic experiment to a truly vital experience of transformation. And the tragedy is she now has nowhere to fit in the society. Transformation is never without consequences.